Mia Fontaine

Six years ago, Mia Fontaine was kidnapped by her own mother and forced into a behavior modification program in the Czech Republic. Around that time, she was a teenage drug addict living in the back of a skinhead’s van in rural Indiana, a most unlikely place given that she is Jewish and had been a straight-A student at an L.A. prep school not long before that.

Come Back is a powerful memoir which combines the voices of Claire and Mia as they fall and, through unconventional therapy and the rediscovery of their own parent-child bond, learn how to pick themselves back up.

I had the good fortune of speaking to Mia, who has gone on to graduate from a major university and currently works in the publishing industry, via email over the past several weeks, and you will find the results below.

It would be understandable for someone who has gone through the
kinds of struggles you’ve endured—from being sexually abused
as a child to getting involved with hardcore drugs as a teenager—to
want to keep that past hidden and to try to forget about it. You
have done the opposite. Why did you decide to write a book about
your experience?

I wrote the book to reach out to others who are, or have been,
"troubled." When you’re struggling, it’s often hard to
see past wherever you’re at; feeling happy or "normal"
seems like such an impossibility, there’s no incentive to change.
I wanted to use my story to demonstrate how change IS possible.
It seems to me that we’re comfortable sharing our joy but don’t
know how to share, and learn from, our sorrow.

The sexual abuse was what I was most nervous to include, but it
was for this same reason that I felt compelled to do so. To explain:
my senior year of college, I was still on the fence about sharing
my story. At the time, I was taking a class called the Personal
Essay and for our final paper, people had chosen such topics as
living with a mother dying of cancer, or being raised by two men.
I decided to write about my molestation to give it a test-run, so
to speak. Not only was the response overwhelmingly positive, but
people came up to me after class to share their own stories of abuse.
I was the first that two of them ever told.

This was a decisive moment for me. If I, someone who had "dealt"
with my past, was still scared, how must the millions of others
feel who have never told anyone, let alone sought help? Victims
of sexual abuse in general, and incest in particular, are usually
given the message to be quiet, to not upset the family, which
means they’re punished twice—first by their offender, then by society.
I want to help take away this stigma.

Given that you got into drugs at such a young age, I get the feeling
that your self-destruction was somewhat inevitable—that someone
who goes through that sort of trauma as a little kid doesn’t have
much of a chance to mature enough to deal with it before the ill
effects begin to ruin their lives. Do you think that’s the case?
What, if anything, do you think could have been done to prevent
the abuse you endured as a small child from destroying your teenage
years?

I do agree that my problems were inevitable, though to what degree
I can’t say with certainty. I was lucky in that I had play-therapy
immediately after the abuse, then again at age seven and eight,
when my nightmares returned. Between those times and until early
adolescence, I had a rather happy childhood with my mom and my "new
dad" (stepdad Paul). I’ve later learned this is typical, as
puberty marks the onset of sexual maturity. If an adult is partially
defined by their sexuality (and a child by their lack of it), for
those of us whose sexualities were "discovered" in childhood,
our natural sexual development was corrupted.

Teenagers tend to define themselves by their feelings. Because
of the abuse, I saw myself as dirty and different, so I embraced
the identity of a screw-up and acted accordingly. Since it was these
feelings about myself that led to my self-destructive behavior,
and because these didn’t surface until adolescence (upon which I
acted on them almost immediately), any sort of prevention seems
almost impossible, as it would have required my mother to predict
the future.

I would like to add, however, that I don’t think inevitability
was necessarily a function of my young age. On the one hand, yes,
children have fewer psychological tools than adults. On the
other hand, adult rape victims, or PTSD veterans, often suffer similarly
for years—panic attacks, substance abuse, irritability, etc. Trauma
is a powerful enough force to impact people equally, regardless
of age.

Also, rather than attribute my problems to a lack of maturity,
I feel it was the opposite. A part of me matured too soon. Being
abused taught me from early childhood that things were not often
as they appeared and that evil was very real. This, more than almost
anything, made me feel different, and older, from my peers, and
therefore more comfortable running away and acting independently
of them (i.e. being the first to lose my virginity or use drugs).

You went through a unique recovery, being rescued from the streets
by your mom and then sent away to an extreme behavior modification
program in the Czech Republic. A lot of parents would never be able
to ship their only child off to a faraway country, and in the book,
you seem to be in disbelief when it happens. Looking back, do you
think you would have made the same decision if you were your mom?

In a second. I realize this sounds strange, considering I
literally wanted to kill her when she put me in, but there’s a good
chance I wouldn’t be around to answer this question had she not.
Speedballing and living with skinheads (while being Jewish) isn’t
exactly something you wait around for your kid to grow out of. Teenage
rebellion is to be expected, but my behavior was way beyond the
norm and, as my mother intuited, it wasn’t about rebellion in my
case, but self-destruction due to the extreme self-loathing I felt. Thankfully,
my mom knew I needed outside help.

Given that she had tried everything else (alternative schools,
therapy, the psych ward, living with a family friend, living with
a relative), at that point this was really her only option. There’s
little available for parents whose kids are completely out of control.
The state isn’t of much help and regular rehab is often too short
to make a difference (it’s also where kids find the best drug connections).
Besides, I could have just signed myself out in three days, as no
state except Montana and Utah allow parents to hold their child
against their will for more than a few days. Civil rights are absolutely
necessary, but like the father’s rights laws that allow a man to
continue visiting a child he admitted to molesting, they can sometimes
backfire. In my case, the state of California left my welfare
in my hands—a fifteen-year-old drug addict.

Because these schools are so controversial, I would like to add
that though our experience was very positive, it was at a specific
time and place. Yes, it was extreme, but so was I, and the extremity
of it was largely what worked.

Mia on her first day at Morava Academy

One of the turning points in your life (and, by extension, this
book) was when Czech authorities shut down the Morava Academy, which
forced you to move to a less extreme sister program in Montana.
In what ways do you feel the change from Morava to the Montana facility
affected your development? What specific aspects of each program
were most effective in helping you recover?

Morava’s closure was such a nightmare that most all of the kids
suffered an emotional setback. Several of the staff we had come
to love and trust were arrested before our very eyes, most journalists
were aggressive, biased and cruel, and police strip-searched many
of us. Having been so closed off to any sort of help, and then to
have the help I finally accepted violently ripped away, I shut down
quite a bit. I came to Spring Creek Lodge (SCL) very hesitant to
open up and went back to old, self-destructive patterns. It was
a good wake-up call, however, in that it gave both my parents and
myself a reality check. It’s easy to make initial changes, harder
to internalize them, so seeing how quickly I reverted gave us a
better idea of where I was actually at with myself.

In terms of the differences between the programs, while they were
run by the same general rules and philosophies, the environments
were like night and day. Morava was as quiet and orderly as SCL
was spontaneous and unpredictable. The most obvious thing that was
so effective about Morava was its location. Given my previous lifestyle,
my mom, wary of another system I could b.s. my way through, chose
a different country in the hopes that I would feel like I hit a
brick wall. It had the intended effect. I was on total silence most
of the day; I was completely separated from the opposite sex (we
had to literally turn away and touch our noses to the wall when
they passed); I had a uniform; I couldn’t shave (which for an Italian
is an unimaginable curse), wear make-up or keep in any piercing
or jewelry; there was no contact with the outside world save letter-writing;
no music, no TV, no radio. The reality of the "program,"
as we called it—short for "behavior modification program"—was
so alien that when you add that to being in a foreign country and
having to speak a different language (German), it was a mighty high
wall!

Because it was so vastly unlike anything I was expecting or had
previously experienced, it took me awhile to adjust, and was therefore
much harder to manipulate my way through. By the time I had actually
figured out how to do this, the desire was gone. Also, because much
of it is peer-regulated, while you could potentially fool an adult,
it’s nearly impossible to con your peers; as they say, you can’t
lie to a liar.

There was also an innocence and joyousness to our lives in Morava
that I never found duplicated in SCL, which was in the States. If
you’ve ever traveled to a poor or non-Western country, it’s not
uncommon to find a whole village of kids and teens playing a game
using sticks, or having the time of their lives dancing to bad eighties
music. Because they don’t have the luxuries American teens do (video
games, TV, a constant supply of films and concerts, etc), they are
more resourceful and self-reliant for entertainment. When I first
arrived, I was embarrassed for teenage ex-gang members laughing
like kindergartners while playing Red Light, Green Light or Capture
the Flag. Were they not aware they looked like complete dorks? But
it wasn’t long before I was actually having more fun dancing to
Richard Simmons’ "Sweatin’ to the Oldies" than I used
to have running around high as a kite. Because there is absolutely
no contact with the outside world, our previous lives and desires
became further and further removed. With other programs, the end
was always in sight, but because of the length of this, once I got
over wanting to kill my mom and finally accepted I’d be here for
a while, I slowly began to lose sight of my previous life and rediscover
who I really was beneath the drugs and depression.

While Morava was very by-the-book, at SCL they dealt with us more
individually and spontaneously. When I first got there, being somewhat
testy and withdrawn, I was put on a challenge to look a new person
in the eye for thirty minutes each day. If I broke contact, we started
all over again, so while this took hours on some days, it did give
me a chance to look at why I had such trouble creating intimacy.

Months later, when Cameron, the director, noticed my extreme distrust
(and disgust) of the opposite sex, he threw me in a boy’s family
for a few months!

Being in rural Montana, the staff were much less formal and direct
and took absolutely NO crap from us—from time to time we would
manipulate our staff’s lack of English to our advantage at Morava
(hence the shift to making us learn and speak only German). Also,
unlike Morava, SCL offered private therapy and I began seeing Mike
Linderman. Unlike previous shrinks, Mike had no problem confronting
me, and as I came to trust and respect him, we began dealing with
my molestation on a much deeper level than I had before. He wasn’t
just concerned with my feelings surrounding the event, but how those
played out in my daily life—choices of boyfriends, being uncomfortable
with my own femininity, etc. There was nothing clinical about him,
and just as he’d swear right back at me and toss me out of his office
for being stubborn or snotty, he’d pull me in for a hug when I needed
one.

What were some of the issues you faced after leaving the program
and re-entering the "real world"? How did the experience
of returning to L.A. after being secluded in the Czech Republic
and rural Montana affect your view of American culture?

I wasn’t terribly concerned about relapsing, going back to street
life, etc. I just wanted such different things for myself (college,
traveling, dating) that the excitement I had for that was much stronger
than any fears I had of going backwards.

There was, however, quite a re-adjustment period! Unexpected things,
like the physical world, bothered me—the noise, the constant movement,
the sheer volume of visual images (people, billboards, buildings).
Sometimes it was humorous. In the program we had to say "excuse
me" every time we passed someone, and for a few months I got
a lot of weird looks when, out of habit, I would excuse myself when
no one else would. My first day of college, I had a moment of panic
when I walked into class and the only other person in there was
a boy (being alone with the opposite sex would drop you several
levels).

I often missed the program. The environment created there was very
open and loving, and the fun we had there was so child-like and
innocent, almost utopian in some ways, strange as it may sound to
say that about a place you’re locked up in. It wasn’t at all uncommon
that you would walk into a classroom or the dining room and to see
people circled up listening to someone share who had an unexpected
issue come up for them. Coming home, it made me sad to have to get
used to the walls people put up and the way people so often hide
or disguise their emotions. You’re stripped down to the bare essentials
in the program; you speak, eat, sleep and speak pretty much only
as needed. It took time to re-adjust to how much people make meaningless
small talk, how excessively we spend money, the unnecessary quantities
of food and drink consumed.

Because I went from one extreme (sex, drugs, street life) to another
(celibacy, sobriety, country living), it took me a long time to
find a good group of friends, as well. The first year or so, I pretty
much hung out with my parents, family friends (which, thankfully,
we had an abundance of), and I threw myself into schoolwork, sculpture,
and martial arts. By the time I went away to university, I was more
like a "normal" teen and did find a great group of friends.

Returning, of all places, to L.A., where so much of American culture
is generated, was quiet a culture shock! Granted, I was only fourteen
when I began my downhill slide, but I was still amazed to see pre-teens
parading around with thongs showing, heavy make-up and smoking.
It seemed that in the time I’d been gone, what teens used to do
at fifteen was now being done by twelve-year-olds and preteen behavior
was now imitated by children. Don’t even get me started on the first
time I saw a Bratz doll!

Our obsession with sexualizing kids struck me as well. I remember
seeing American Beauty shortly after I came home, and while
I liked the film because of how well done it was, as someone who
personally felt the repercussions of an adult sexualizing a child,
I simultaneously felt guilty about watching something that felt
irresponsible. Though ultimately nothing does happen between them,
what stays in your mind after the movie are the fantasy scenes filled
with rose petals and the promise of sex between a fifteen-year-old
girl and a forty-year-old man.

Do you have any ideas as to where this "obsession with sexualizing
kids" comes from? Why are advertisers so insistent on trying
to convince twelve-year old girls to dress like whores?

The easy answer is money. If advertisers can take an already existing
market (women) and greatly expand it by marketing the same products
(make-up, thongs, jewelry, etc.) to children and teens, their profits
dramatically increase. It’s common knowledge that kids want to grow
up, that they strive to appear older than they are to win respect
among their peers (it’s typically the kids that experimented first
with drugs, alcohol and sex that were seen as the "cool"
kids). It’s even easier to market to young girls because they’re
insecure about their looks in a way boys aren’t. The sad part, though,
is that most kids only like the illusion of adulthood; the reality
of it, once they discover for themselves what that is, is generally
less agreeable. I often observed girls get into situations where,
flattered by the adult attention received from acting and dressing
like they were much older, they are either forced into sex or just
do it because they’re too scared to say no when they realize older
guys usually aren’t content with a junior high make-out session.
The school I was at was full of girls wounded from those encounters.

The harder question to answer, however, is why our culture condones,
if not subtly encourages, this. I think part of it is parents. Advertisers
probably know that a lot of parents find it easier to throw the
Bratz dolls and thongs in the cart than face the inevitable tantrum
if they don’t. Some are simply too busy or checked-out to notice
what their kids bring home with their allowance. I also think there
are a lot of men who are aroused by pubescent girls. It’s a cliché,
but it probably makes a lot of them feel young again or reminds
them of their first sexual encounter. The other thing you usually
hear, and I think is true, is that young girls come without the
maturity and expectations of adult women—young girls are more pliable,
unthreatening; older, more sophisticated men can mold them to their
desires and needs.

Mia with mom/co-author Claire

As a teenager you went through this whole ordeal of running away
and speedballing with skinheads, tormenting your mom. Then, after
your time in the program, you actually ended up writing a whole
book with her. After everything that happened, what was it like
writing a book with the woman who, not long before that, essentially
had you committed?

Thankfully, by the time we sat down to write the book, that wasn’t
an issue. Besides the passing of time, the work we had done on our
relationship during the two years I was in the school had totally
transformed our relationship. Yes, I was furious for the first few
months, but once I had completely detoxed, even for a stubborn fifteen
year-old, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize what might
have happened if I stayed where I was. Or to recognize the gift
that was dropped in my lap. Not many people get a chance to start
over with such a clean slate; I had the opportunity to explore every
aspect of myself in great depth—basically I got an instruction
manual in being me. The emotional and psychological tools I learned
still benefit me today.

Nonetheless, any mother and daughter working AND living together
is a challenge. There’s both more fun and more bickering than would
exist in a typical professional relationship, as the line between
personal and professional is completely blurred. There were times
when my mom would use professionalism as a guise to continue mothering
her adult daughter (“stop eating that ice cream, TV adds ten
pounds”), and there were times when I, childishly, was reluctant
to listen to professional comments simply because of who they came
from.

Additionally, to authentically recreate your life on paper, we
both found it necessary to relive it to some degree. When we wrote
about my time in Indiana, my lowest low, levels of irritability
and tension were pretty high. We also both learned some very painful
things about each other that we hadn’t previously known. She, for
instance, hadn’t known I was raped and, because of my young age,
I never realized the extent of what she suffered while married to
a perverse and abusive husband (my biological father).

The experience deepened our bond and broadened our relationship.
Just as writing about Indiana created some tension between us, remembering
how close we came to losing each other—and later writing about
how we mended our relationship—allowed us to re-learn some lessons
and renew our appreciation of each other. Also, as painful as it
was to read the early chapter, in which my mother chronicles the
abuse, because she was writing about a time in her life when she
was just a couple of years older than I am now, I was able to see
a side of my mother that most daughters don’t, and I came to value
and respect sides of her as a woman, not just a mother.

The end result of your collective work is a remarkably effective
blend of your mom’s voice and yours. Off the top of my head I can’t
think of many narratives with two authors which are able to create
the force of your memoir. Beyond the mother-daughter aspects of
creating this book, what issues were involved in shaping the structure
and the voice of Come Back? Were you influenced by other
memoirs?

One of the hardest things about writing a memoir is deciding which
incidents to include. You can write several memoirs of one life,
and, depending on the focus of the book, have several very different
stories. It essentially depends on what your argument, or purpose,
is. That’s what determines which lens you view your life through,
what events, and the themes they embody, you choose to include.
Because our purpose was to emotionally impact those dealing with
any of the issues we did—the mother/daughter relationship, abuse
of any kind, family dysfunction, substance abuse, not living up
to your potential—to best carry this out, we felt the narrative
had to be present-tense, dramatic and honest.

The basic structure was determined by actual events in the order
they happened. My mom being a screenwriter meant that we structured
it in great detail before we wrote a word. A lot of memoirs go back
and forth in time throughout the book, but with two voices we felt
that would confuse readers. My mom decided to go back in time only
once to tell the background story of my early childhood, then bring
us back to the present and stay there.

We used the back/forth format of our two voices both to create dramatic
structure within each chapter, but also to bring to light how easy
it is for communication between two people to break down. Very often,
particularly between a parent and child, when one says something,
the other hears something very different. Using two voices also
allowed us to show how vastly different two people can experience
the same events. The emotional tone of our sections were true to
our experiences, which meant that sometimes they were complimentary,
others in sharp, almost painful, contrast.

We did read a few memoirs, West with the Night, by Beryl
Markham, Tara Smith Bray’s Into the West, A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers, though not for anything
we might learn from. There really isn’t a memoir—that we know of—that’s
written the way ours is. It was often doubly hard, by the way, because
even if one of us got our own sections of a chapter down well and
we were really happy with it, it all was up for grabs as the other
integrated theirs. So we had to create each chapter twice—first
our own sections, then the chapter of two married sections.

What have you learned from all this? Where do you go from here?

As a young teen, I felt really powerless. Being screwed-up seemed
like such an intrinsic part of who I was that the drugs, the running
away, etc., didn’t seem like something I could control, they were
simply things that someone like me did (which was, of course, a
huge cop-out).

But I’ve come to realize that it isn’t so much what happens to
you or what you witness, it’s the story you tell yourself about
the event that matters. And that’s the key. Once I got that, on
a gut level got it, I made lasting changes and that’s the lesson
I hope others take away from my story because that realization changed
my life. You can tell yourself any story you want because you get
to create your life—we really do make it all up every day. Little
kids know this and it’s something we forget too easily as adults
with bills to pay and places to be and people to meet. With rare
exceptions, life doesn’t really just "happen," we create
it with the choices we make throughout every day. This is what accountability,
as I understand it, really is—owning all your results, good and
bad. Accountability is incredibly empowering; it allows you to take
control of your life, of who you are, of how you show up in the
world.

Writing a book seemed like a fitting end to this chapter of our
lives (no pun intended). Looking back on what happened, with the
objectivity that time gives, and capturing what it all meant was
a great way to reflect on what we learned, celebrate our good fortune,
gain closure, and give back to others.

Future plans: The first thing most people ask is if I have future
books in the works. The answer, currently, is no. I have a couple
of ideas, but they’re both subjects that require a lot of research
and, frankly, having been out of society for over a year while writing
Come Back, I like the idea of living in it for awhile.
I feel like I have to take something in before I can put something
out. So I’m currently living in New York City and work in the publicity
department of a publishing house. It’s cliché, but yes I’d
like to travel, perhaps teach English in a foreign country (preferably
a non-Western one) to get a radically different perspective on life
and the world.